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TornCityVenz writes "I've seen many complaints in the feedback on Slashdot every time an article on Google's Chrome browser hits; the calls for true cross platform availability have struck me as a valid complaint. So now it seems Google is answering your calls, promising in this article on CNET a deadline for Mac and Linux support." I'd really like to not care about the name of the browser I'm using, but the mental cost of switching could be high for someone used to particular Firefox extensions, unless or until they can all be expected to work seamlessly with Chrome.

Google "hopes to release versions for Mac OS X and Linux by the first half of the year". That's the closest thing TFA gives to a date, and Google hardly promises anything. The summary is somewhat misleading.

According to the mac status page [chromium.org] for Chromium, the browser currently fails 10% of the Webkit layout tests; work hasn't even started on building a user interface yet. So I think a release within six months is a bit optimistic.

If you'd like to get a preview of the Mac release, there are up-to-date builds available here [securityandthe.net] so you don't have to compile it yourself.

They have a goal to sell their online Office suite and other apps and services, almost all of which are accessed via the browser. What would happen if the next version of I.E. broke some of their apps? They can't afford to be at anybody's mercy.

Just because you use the "beta" version of their software doesn't mean that there's not a release available -- it just doesn't have the same features. Google does have paid for services in addition to the free ones, or didn't you know that?

You would be correct if any of those (Pidgin, etc) would support video and voice (which they don't). It's been years since we have been promised at least voice support, but it isn't there. So, Pidgin and Co. can do IM just fine, but that is about it.

Honestly, if you want voice, pick up a phone. Or use Skype if your motivation is to avoid charges. I'll cede that Google Talk (the client) isn't 100% available on non-Windows platforms. But I'll add that the portion 99% of its users actually use, i.e. IM, is 100% available on non-Windows platforms by way of Pidgin, Adium, etc.

1) Google Talk client doesn't support AIM (even though the web version does, sigh) or the video chat. That means you wouldn't use the Google Talk client as much as you might want to

2) Pidgin crashes a fucking hell of a lot. I've never used a version that didn't blow up on exit, or nuke when a file is downloaded, or if someone messages you, or if you enable ANY plugin at all. The quality of the project is absolutely down there in the sewers, and the same bugs affect both the Linux AND W

It's XMPP with custom extensions to support voice, and possibly other features as well. From the horse's mouth [google.com]:

Google Talk uses extensions to XMPP for voice signaling and peer-to-peer communication. Source code and documentation for these extensions is now available.

In addition, these extensions are in the process of being reviewed by the XMPP standards body as official enhancements (known as XEPs) to the standard. Note that the source code for Google Talk's current implementation of these extensions varie

but the mental cost of switching could be high for someone used to particular Firefox extensions, unless or until they can all be expected to work seamlessly with Chrome.

What's the big rush? I tried Linux several times before I finally dual booted, then went on later to make the switch. If Chrome offers some features you find compelling, there's no reason they can't share browsing duty.

A little competition is a good thing. Though I do have to say that opening up their platform for custom user extensions was a brilliant move by Mozilla.

Any new browser really has to support user-made extensions to survive amongst the geeky, one feels

True, but the geeky, also known as the early adopters or cutting edge users, are not typically the majority of the market. In 1996, yes, in 1999, maybe, but in 2009, we're a very vocal minority.

To be honest, I'm making that call based on anecdotal data; I don't know what the real numbers are, but for most people I know or work with outside of my geek set, a custom browser is IE with the Google toolbar, or if you're a teenager, StumbleUpon.

Except that StarOffice is a paid version of OpenOffice, while Chrome doesn't use many (if any) code from Firefox, not even the rendering engine. Besides, Mozilla isn't "owned" by Google, they receive funds in exchange of providing Google as the default search engine.

It's true that Mozilla providing a default search engine is a service that search-engine companies find valuable. On the other hand, having a useful default search engine is also something that Mozilla's users find valuable, so Mozilla is constrained in how they can sell that particular service.

If Some Guy's Horrible Search That Doesn't Work offered Mozilla a bazillion dollars for placement as the default search engine, they would likely have to turn it down, if they wanted their users to not hate them.

ah, but my 15 extensions worth of bloat is quite different to yours (except for noscript and addblock, probably). Since we both just get the features we want, is it rely bloat, which tends to be defined as extraneous and vaguely useful features that have been hanging around for a while.

I (personally) subscribe to the unix philosophy, so I actually still consider it bloat. Rather than having one tool
with exactly all the features I want, I prefer having many smaller tools with only some of
the features I want (also, I actually use w3m because it integrates much better with the bash shell, and lets me use a decent editor for filling out html text boxes).

They wrote a Windows wrapper around cross platform libraries. Then they had the nerve to deny it, even when anybody who looked at the source code immediately after initial release could see the truth of the matter.

This indicates that Google did have multiplatform support in mind from the beginning. If they hadn't used native Windows libs for the GUI, I'm pretty certain we'd be hearing just as much bitching about how cross platform libs never perform as solidly as native ones.

Then they had the nerve to deny it, even when anybody who looked at the source code immediately after initial release could see the truth of the matter.

Gtk? Ugh. Why not write the whole damn thing in Python with tkinter and just write a webkit interface for the python app? Then, when webkit changes, just update a DLL/shared library, and use Py2Exe or something similar for Win deployment.

If I were Google (that is a great sentence) I would base it on QT 4. Fast, customizable, cross-platform, modern and integrated with WebKit.

Qt is nice, but its licensing prevents Google from using it in this way. To use Qt, Google would need to either pay for a license, but it wouldn't be transferable to others, or Chrome would need to be GPLed. Google goes to great effort to license it's code under the Apache/BSD/etc. licenses whenever possible, as it considers this better for it's business (and that's a reasonable position to take).

Until Nokia relicenses Qt to something like the LGPL - many of us would welcome that! - GTK will remain the library of choice in situations like this.

Qt is nice, but its licensing prevents Google from using it in this way. To use Qt, Google would need to either pay for a license,

This would be no problem. Fact is, Google already does exactly this for other products.

but it wouldn't be transferable to others,

??? What are you talking about? Companies sell, eg transfer, software developed with Qt all the time, it's what is made for after all. Obviously the license allow it.

or Chrome would need to be GPLed. Google goes to great effort to license it's code under the Apache/BSD/etc. licenses whenever possible, as it considers this better for it's business (and that's a reasonable position to take).

Companies sell, eg transfer, software developed with Qt all the time, it's what is made for after all. Obviously the license allow it.

Not what I meant by 'transfer'. You can copy the software, but not transfer the license. In other words, you can distribute your product, but others are not free to fork your product and redistribute it. The forkers would need to purchase a license as well.

I am aware of this, but not entirely sure about what it means. After all, you can already link GPL code with BSD code (that's how the BSDs use ext2/3 code, for example). That's because the BSD license is compatible with the GPL, which means BSD can be rel

Chrome's V8 javascript language compiles Javascript into native code, that's one of the main reasons it's so fast. Also, it uses a lot of platform-specific hacks to do this, especially for memory managemen, support for multitasking etc.

Chrome codebase is not "cross platform", in that you can't just go ahead and compile it for Linux. They are still implementing a Gtk ui - see

Or, to put it another way, Google's entire contribution to the Chrome browser was a non-crossplatform, non-portable UI. V8 and WebKit were done by others and are cross-platform. Google knows their browser is just polish on other people's success with WebKit and V8 which is why they stole the name "chrome" from Mozilla.

There's basically one thing that makes Chrome special and that's running tabs in a separate process (for plugins, nspluginwrapper already does this).

Google gets a lot more credit for Chrome than they deserve. If it wasn't done by Google it would be hardly even notable.

Why couldn't they choose cross-platform components in the first place? I doubt it would complicate things much (note I'm only talking about choosing cross-platform components, not about making sure the whole thing compiles on other OSs), and they could have spared much of the later hassle of porting the core components.

Actually, I don't think this was a 20% project. Chrome had a team of engineers working on it, and at its core it has the V8 Javascript engine. You don't just wake up one day and say "Hey, why don't I write an optimized Javascript engine from scratch!" This is a project that fits in with Google's strategic vision, and it had the necessary manpower allocated to it.

I just don't understand why it is taking Google so long to release a Mac and Linux version.

Well, according to this [theregister.co.uk] they used Windows' own HTTP protocol implementation for the first version - they've now written their own.

I suspect that Google are less concerned about taking marketshare from Safari (Mac) and Firefox (linux) than they are about getting established on Windows. Methinks their priority is to ensure that there is a Google-branded alternative to IE they can use as a web app platform just in case Microsoft does something to break Google Docs on IE (inadvertantly of course - no company with Microsoft's reputation would stoop to telling their developers that "IE9 ain't done until Gmail won't run"...)

Well, according to this [theregister.co.uk] they used Windows' own HTTP protocol implementation for the first version - they've now written their own.

Which is one of the major reasons I had problems using Chrome as a default browser. Not having something like the "foxyproxy" plugin was bad enough, but dealing with Chrome's hooks into the Windows/IE proxy settings was really annoying.

GUI programming and inter-process communication are vastly different on Windows than Linux/Mac; a lot of their code for Chrome was to make the existing code (WebKit) work with this design, but a lot of the rest was code that has to be completely rewritten - and chances are, a lot of the code that they wrote that they can keep needs to be updated to work on more than just Windows as well.

What's the big difference in IPC? I mean... shared memory is shared memory. Network sockets are network sockets. Any clever Windows thing should be wrappable in shared memory and semaphores and work fine on POSIX with only a thin compatibility layer.

I recommend Windows System Programming by Hart [amazon.com] if you want to get a feeling for it. It's arguably a better (and certainly more modern) API than the classic UNIX set. I mean, fork() is a pretty weird way to create a new process, if you think about it.

This is _not_ an endorsement of the entire Windows OS, which has miles-deep layers of cruft and crap on top -- just talking about the kernel and core system services.

No two operating systems are exactly the same, from the programmer's perspective. The available operating system interfaces for everything from file access to network interface control can be very different. Not just the names of library functions, but how the needed functionality is divided into operations. It turns out that the major division in widely used desktop OSes right now is between Windows (does everything its own way) and everyone else (does everything the UNIX way). It's not to say there ar

At least for Linux I wrote up a bunch it two months ago here:
http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2008/11/status-of-chromium-on-linux.html [blogspot.com]
Summary: It didn't even compile on anything but a very specific windows compiler when it was launched in September. Chrome was done by a Visual Studio team entirely on Windows. Now they are discovering all the fun of not planing ahead for cross platform.

I think Google is a better strategist than you are giving them credit to. Google doesn't give a shit whether there is Chrome on Mac or Linux, because those platforms are covered by Firefox and other non-Explorer browsers, and Google is fine with that. Google even sponsors Firefox, by the tune of millions of dollars.

Google has one goal in mind: increase the non-IE marketshare. IE only exists on Windows, hence Chrome only needs to be able to fight on that platform.

Now, if you don't even understand why Google needs to increase the non-IE marketshare, I can't help you.

Ah, I forgot about something. Not just the JavaScript engine is probably win32 specific, but Chrome also relies heavily on inter-process communication (since each tab in each window has its own process).
I'm betting good money that this is very hard to do properly cross-platform.

but the mental cost of switching could be high for someone used to particular Firefox extensions, unless or until they can all be expected to work seamlessly with Chrome.

Unless I am grossly misinformed, I do not see how Firefox extensions could work at all on Chrome, let alone 'seamlessly'. A statement such as this essentially says "I will only use exactly what I have now"

You'll never see an adblock plugin for Chrome from Google themselves. As a company that runs two of the largest ad networks on the Internet (Doubleclick and Google Adsense), they won't even consider it.

Sorry, Timothy: it's doubtful you'll see out of the box compatibility with AdBlock for Chrome.Why would a technology company that generates revenue from ads want to allow you to block the ads?Slashdot's pretty greedy these days; there's ads in my RSS feed from Slashdot.I ignore them.

Google would lose nothing from allowing adblock. In fact, they would only gain from it.

The only reason to block ads for most people is because they are distracting. This means flash, animated gifs, and rotating scripts. If ads didn't move, there would be a much reduced need to block them. Personally I just can't read a page if something is blinking in the corner. Prior to adblock, I'd have to put pieces of paper over parts of the screen, or scroll it to hide ads. Advertisers have always lost me as customer by advertising in this way.

I don't, and I suspect most people don't, ever block text based ads. I've no problem with them. Thus Google's ads get through. Google understands that text based ads do not bug most people, hence it's always been their ideology to use them.

If adblocking of moving images is more widespread, then text based ads become the primary way of reaching customers. That's a win for everyone -- especially Google. (the only losers are low-life flash ad designers, whose unemployment is most welcome.)

The only reason to block ads for most people is because they are distracting.

The reason that I block ads, aside from being ugly and distracting from content, or from being intrusive, is because 99% of the time when a page is insanely slow to load, it's because it's waiting on some Javascript or image from the ad server, which is apparently overloaded.

Most of the time when I try to load a page and it won't load, it's an indicator that ad blocking is off. I also block Google Analytics and Digg badges as well.

I don't, and I suspect most people don't, ever block text based ads. I've no problem with them. Thus Google's ads get through. Google understands that text based ads do not bug most people, hence it's always been their ideology to use them.

'Most people' (that use ads) use predefined ad lists, which include Google ads. Unless a covenant was reached to remove Google from those lists, they'd stay there; the only other option would be for Google to make its own adblock list without its own ads and ship that to the browser.

Though imagine if a company that was the biggest ad provider on the internet released software that let users browse the internet with only their own ads. I can see some people getting pissed off about that.

I don't, and I suspect most people don't, ever block text based ads. I've no problem with them. Thus Google's ads get through. Google understands that text based ads do not bug most people, hence it's always been their ideology to use them.

Is there actually a precedent for successful legal action over stuff like that? Have advertisers sued VCR manufacturers, Tivo, etc? What about the old adware junk that would look at ads and let users see competing offers? I know advertisers complained, but did anything ever come of it? I don't think there's a specific law against it, and there aren't contracts between any of the parties involved.

NBC, ABC and CBS filed a lawsuit Wednesday in federal court in California against Sonicblue, claiming the ReplayTV 4000 would violate their copyrights by allowing users to distribute copies of programs over the Internet.
The networks also complained that technology in the personal video recorder can automatically strip out commercials.
In a joint statement, the networks said the device "violates the rights of copyright owners in unprecedented ways" and "deprives the copyright owners of the means by which they are paid for their creative content and thus reduces the incentive to create programming and make it available to the public."

Why would a technology company that generates revenue from ads want to allow you to block the ads?

Well, I'm sure they don't really want to allow you to block the ads. But I'm also sure that you will be able to.

If they really wanted to make sure no one ever could block ads, they could have simply not released the source. They could have released a free-as-in-beer web browser, and crippled it however they liked. This would reduce overall acceptance of their browser, as some of us wouldn't use it, but proba

Having been checking out the incredibly high quality Google Chrome code and what it is doing it is understandable that there was going to be a delay for other platforms.

The reason Chrome is so much faster than other browsers - especially even after days of constant webbrowsing is all the platform specific work with memory protection and threading.

I've honestly been using the Chrome source code as a tremendous learning tool to get up to speed on how to write modern threaded application code.

The delay will be worth it when you get your hands on it. Switching to Chrome had that feeling of running your old apps on a new and faster computer. It just feels so smooth no matter how many tab or windows are open or how much Javascript is running in the background.

There's benefit to having broad OS availability. Safari is available on OS X and Windows but not Linux. Safari is also pretty closed as far as plug-ins are concerned. So is Chrome, at the moment, but they're working to rectify that. If Safari ran on Linux and had an open platform for add-ons, I'd be more inclined to agree with you that there's no need for Chrome.

Presumably Google's other motivation is to provide a run-time environment for future web-based applications they might release. If they own the browser on which these applications will run, they can more easily remedy any bugs or performance concerns that crop up instead of having to wait for a third-party to take care of them.

Safari on windows is quite the memory and cpu hog.* I certainly hope it's better on Mac, where both are more scarce. If it's as bad on Mac as it is on windows, though, I think people would run for chrome the second it was made available.

*I suppose my experience could be a configuration issue: the freakin' apple page that it starts with occasionally pegs my trusty ol' athlon XP at 100% and 450 MB footprint. Still, Chrome, Firefox, and IE don't do that or anything like it, and I'm quite unmotivated to do a

This seems like an instance where "most bang for your buck" comes into play. IMO Google doesn't need to offer the full flexibility of FireFox as long as they provide replacements for the most popular plug-ins. In other words: Ad-Block Plus, Foxmarks, GreaseMonkey and FireBug.

Ad blocking, and "content blocking" in a more general sense, has always struck me as a task that should be "built in" to a browser instead of handled by a plug-in. Possibly also bookmark synchronization. GreaseMonkey and FireBug ar

I'd really like to not care about the name of the browser I'm using, but the mental cost of switching could be high for someone used to particular Firefox extensions, unless or until they can all be expected to work seamlessly with Chrome.

Is that coming from the same people that ask to switch to FFox from MSIE (or from Windows to Linux), even that could be some "essential" plugin/extra/program/whatever that wont work seamlessly in firefox?

At least there is an advantage in Firefox extensions: they are (most, at least) opensource. If Chrome have any way to be able to "plug" code from others (call it plugin, extension, addon, whatever) those essential firefox extensions could be ported, adapted or recoded to fit in the new browser, and with a

Yes, I know I'm hopelessly behind the times with my *ancient* G4 mini, but if there's a group that needs a faster browser, it's us "obsolete computer users". Obsolete meaning the computer, not the user.

I know that x86 is the way forward, but I see more and more Intel-only apps that make me wonder what exactly prohibited the devs from making it a Universal Binary.

Microsofts Live Mesh comes to mind (I wanted to install it to compare it to Dropbox); not even a decent message stating that it was Intel-only, it just said that my device wasn't supported or something. Dropbox on Linux/PPC is another culprit, btw.

I'm hoping V8 gets ported to PPC as well, although I'm somewhat worried that it won't, since a JS interpreter sounds a bit more involved than a file syncing thingy.